Finally, a headline of my dreams: "Rand Paul: Democrats Should Be `Embarassed' To Be Seen With Bill Clinton."
In fact, the headline is stronger than Paul's actual statement -- Democrats "ought to be a little embarassed" -- but I'll gladly take it, and extend my heartfelt thanks and congratulations to Sen. Paul for being the first political leader I can remember (maybe ever?) to state the obvious: Bill Clinton, sexual predator and accused rapist, not to mention creator of the Chinese military threat (for campaign contributions), is a national disgrace,...

On Feb. 9, 50.3 percent of Swiss voters passed a referendum to cap immigration from the EU. In the course of a (very hostile) Spiegel Online interview with Christoph Blocher, leader of the Swiss People's Party, the impetus becomes clear. The EU's so-called freedom of movement -- read: untrammeled immigration into decreasingly sovereign states -- has approached a crisis for Swiss nationhood.

"Some 23.8 percent of Switzerland's population is comprised of foreigners, and almost 15 percent are first-generation naturalized Swiss citizens," Blocher said. "No similar European state has anything like that."

Once the shocking fact that nearly one in four people in Switzerland are foreigners sinks in, it seems logicial to conclude, as Galliawatch does, that many if not most non-native voters probably opposed the immigration cap. That means that the outcome among native Swiss was likely...

"The Grinning Generals" by Rob Crllly is a recent London Telegraph story all about the above photo of two generals, one Afghan, one American. Noting the identity of the pair -- Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson, the new ISAF commander, and Maj. Gen. Abdul Raziq, the police chief of Kandahar "accused of corruption, drug running and, most extraordinarily of all, mass murder," Crilly is incredulous that this unseemly embrace was not secretly snapped and smuggled to news media. On the contrary, it is an official US government handout.

House Speaker John Boehner made headlines on February 6 for tabling immigration "overhaul" -- one week after indicating it was at the top of this session's agenda.

But don't think anyone has put the hatchets away. Measures hacking away at the US border, US citizenship, and US law itself continue across the land even as Congress increasingly becomes the 535-figured-headed white elephant on the Hill. More American Betrayal, and at breakneck speed.

Some recent dispatches from the world of do-it-yourself, forget-about-the-legislature, immigration-policy-making.

Immigration reform may be at an intractable standstill but former Washington Post Publisher Donald Graham is creating an organization to do what the federal government has been unable to do: help make it possible for young, undocumented immigrants to go to college, and by extension,...

I will be writing more about an extraordinary development in what has heretofore been former Reagan-era Pentagon official Frank Gaffney's heroic but very lonely quest: namely, to throw light on what ten prominent former national security officials are now publicly calling Grover Norquist's and Suhail Khan's "ties to and activities in support of Islamists inside the United States, including the Muslim Brotherhood, its operatives, front groups and agenda."

In other words, their ties and activities in support of ... enemy jihadists.

This case of stealth jihad inside the Right now has the on-the-record endorsement of 1) former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, 2) former CIA Director James Woolsey, 3) former Rep. Allen West, 4) fomer Commander in Chief,...

This (above) is a screen shot of a tweet from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, regarding Obama's most recent executive branch power grab from the legislative branch. Grassley's bottom line: "Obama admin can't change law w memo."

Grassley also put the same message in proper English in a statement reported in the Washington Post:

“Marijuana trafficking is illegal under federal law, and it’s illegal for banks to deal with marijuana sale proceeds under federal law. Only Congress can change these laws. The administration can’t change the law with a memo.”

This week, The Washington Free Beacon published a story by Alana Goodman based on excerpts from the papers of Deeda Blair, an intimate friend of Hillary and Bill Clinton, under the headine, "The Hillary Papers: Archive of Closest Friend Paints Portrait of Ruthless First Lady."

Media filters -- censors -- went haywire attempting to downplay and dismiss the findings (NBC's Andrea Mitchell admitted on "Morning Joe" that she had argued against NBC even mentioning the Free Beacon story), which are of interest given the source: Hillary Clinton's best friend. That is, the evidence has long and redundantly demonstrated that Hillary Rodham Clinton is "ruthless" -- Goodman finds the adjective in a heretofore unpublished 1992 report by Clinton presidential campaign pollsters Stan Greenberg and Celinda Lake -- but...

I am happy to say that American Betrayal continues to be reviewed, debated and discussed widely. I couldn't have been more pleasantly surprised than when I noticed this charming Twitter pic and profile above -- a soulmate, clearly, but no relation!

The book is also, I gather from Twitter, making the rounds in The Netherlands, and I just posted a new letter in Reader's Corner from Kiev, Ukraine. In December, a letter, also posted in Reader's Corner, came in from St. Petersburg, Russia.

One of the hats I wear is that of Washington correspondent for Dispatch International, a European weekly newspaper co-edited by Danish journalist and historian Lars Hedegaard. The name may ring a bell with U.S. readers because last February, a man dressed up as a postman with a fake package tried to assassinate Hedegaard, a noted critic of Islamization and proponent of free speech, at his home in Copenhagen. International headlines followed.

One year later, Hedegaard lives under state protection, and there have been no arrests. But that’s not what this week’s column is about.

A few days ago, Hedegaard wrote me with a new assignment:

“Would you write something about a disturbing phenomenon: the fact that Obama rules by decree and neglects the Constitution. How can this go on? Nixon was a complete amateur compared to this would-be Kim Jong-un....

Venetians are up in arms over plans to build an Islamic centre on the banks of the lagoon city's Grand Canal.

Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta announced plans to build the Islamic museum and study centre during a meeting with the Emir of Qatar.

Letta, who is in the Middle East to drum up investment for Italy’s woe-begotten state industries, said the leaders had ‘made a commitment to explore the opportunity to build an Islamic museum in Venice on the Grand Canal.’

Over the long run the easing of sanctions against Iran spells trouble for the economics of the tight oil plays that have sprung up across the United States in recent years. The Eagle Ford and Permian Basin and Bakken need sustained high oil prices to make the economics of expensive drilling and steep decline rates pay off. It’s no coincidence that America’s great oil and gas renaissance has coincided with sanctions on Iran and unrest in Libya. The concern for U.S. drillers is that successful Middle Eastern diplomacy could end up being the worst thing for their business. If crude oil benchmarks were to fall to $75 a barrel...

Twice, Hutchins’ conviction by a military court martial for unpremeditated murder in Iraq has been overturned due to factors precluding a fair trial. That means that twice, following Hutchins’ initial conviction in 2007, he has been released from the brig a free man.

After his conviction was overturned the first time, there were eight months of freedom in 2010. Then, on the day his wife Reyna found out she was pregnant with their second child, Hutchins, a third-generation Marine, returned to prison. Last summer, the military’s highest appeals court overturned his conviction a second time. For the past six months, Hutchins has been living with Reyna and their two children, Kylie, 8, and Aidan, 2, while teaching marksmanship at Camp Pendleton. A new baby is on the way. Now, he – and they – must prepare for a new trial, his third. Why?

The Washington Post's Walter Pincus has extracted some other items of interest from Robert Gates' book, Duty (noted earlier here). These include the forgotten fact that the Bush administration discussed withdrawing the "surge" in Iraq even as it was getting underway, much as the Obama administration would do more emphatically vis a vis Afghanistan. (Similarly, a withdrawal date from Iraq was set by Bush.)

Also this:

Another Gates disclosure provides another lesson: information about Syria building in 2005 what turned out to be a North Korean-designed nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium during the Bush administration.

Though the United States considered Syria a high-priority intelligence target, it was Israel that supplied the compelling evidence in spring 2007 about its nuclear activities. Gates, a former CIA director, said this represented “a significant failure on...

Two Iraqi men in their 20s have been convicted of a bloody sex crime in Colorado that left the victim, a woman in her 50s, in need of immediate surgery and a colostomy bag. Three other Iraqi men, also in their 20s,were convicted on lesser charges as accessories.

Four points set this case apart. First, there is its brutality: Law enforcement officers describe the July 2012 assault as "rare" and "horrific" and "one of the worst in Colorado history." Second, all of these men once assisted U.S. military forces in Iraq as informants and interpreters. Third, every one of them received permanent residency status in the U.S., due in part to efforts made by U.S. military members on their behalf. Fourth, this extraordinary case and the ties that bind it to the U.S. military and the war in Iraq have received little coverage.

At Breitbart News today -- the 64th anniversay of the conviction of Alger Hiss, by the way -- M. Stanton Evans has published a brand new article, "`McCarthyism by the Numbers." Besides laying to rest the canard that Sen. Joseph McCarthy's investigations only netted a "few small fry," it concretely strengthens the defense of American Betrayal against all those tired, postmodern, juju-charges of "McCarthyism."

Which isn't to say, of course, that I don't take "McCarthy's heiress" as a compliment.

"`McCARTHYISM' BY THE NUMBERS"

by M. Stanton Evans

The orchestrated attack on Diana West’s important book, American Betrayal, has been brutal and unseemly, but in one respect at...

In 2012, five Iraqi men in their 20s were arrested on charges in Colorado related to the extremely bloody rape and assault of a woman, who has been variously described as elderly or middle-aged. It was a sex crime so violent law enforcement describe it as "rare" and "horrific" and "one of the worst in Colorado history."

Finally, the last defendant in the crime now comes to trial. His name is Jasim Ramadon, above in orange. A decade ago, Jasim, known as "Steve-O," helped US troops i.d. Saddam loyalists, including his father.

UPDATE: Jasim Ramadon has been convicted on multiple counts of sexual assault.

After endorsing the gubernatorial run of conservative California Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, a Tea Party favorite who opposes illegal immigration, actress Maria Conchita Alonso "abruptly" left the cast of a San Francisco play this week.

From the local CBS story:

The actress was to perform next month at the Brava Theater Center in San Francisco’s Mission District in a Spanish-language version of “The Vagina Monologues,” scheduled for a run from February 14th through 17th. The show is being produced by none other than Eliana Lopez, wife of San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi.

“We really cannot have her in the show, unfortunately,” Lopez told KPIX 5. She said Alonso abruptly resigned from the cast on Friday, given the backlash on the immigration issue.

“Of course she has the right to say whatever she wants. But we’re in the middle of the Mission. Doing what...

I've been mulling how -- or even whether -- to mark the appearance of six entries on American Betrayal in the January 2014 issue of The New Criterion. The issue contains an essay by editor Roger Kimball and five letters, all devoted to my book, or, rather, to Andrew C. McCarthy's review of American Betrayal, which appeared in the December 2013 issue.
Why so much ink? The answer is simple. Andy McCarthy, the celebrated former federal prosecutor, noted author and commentator, had the temerity to write positive things about my book in his December review. Like a clanging bell to Pavlov's dog, this review drove Ronald Radosh and Conrad Black to churn out letters to the editor explaining to McCarthy the error of his ways. By my count, this becomes the fifth, maybe even the sixth piece by Radosh, and the fourth or fifth by Black. Harvey Klehr and John Haynes also write in general protest. I...

I don’t know if Mr. O’Sullivan has ever been in the military, let alone in combat. Let us not get into an argument over whether we should go to war, for whatever reason, this movie is not about that. War is a terrible thing, has been for thousands of years, an unavoidable consequence of man’s ignorance, of man’s inhumanity to man.
War is in our genes and will never cease. I dare anyone to argue that.
I have seen war in Vietnam, and like my father and my father-in-law in WWII, and my son in Iraq and Afghanistan, experienced the worst...

March 1940 NKVD memo by Beria, released by Russia in 2010, proposing mass execution of thousands of Polish POWs. Signed approval by Stalin, K. Voroshilov, V. Molotov, and A. Mikoyan. Signatures in left margin are M. Kalinin and L. Kaganovich. Soviet guilt for this massacre was known to US and GB beginning in 1943, but Allies joined Stalin's conspiracy of silence.

This week's syndicated column

The power of history to speak to us depends on our ability to hear it. When we are deaf to its secrets, or too confused or conditioned to decipher them, we miss the opportunity to be empowered by them. We thus fail to overcome the propaganda our own government, like the dictatorships we revile, has all too often deceived us with.

I am struck by this aura of static around a sensational new discovery. Researcher and author...

RLN.fm, a news site described to me as "Russian libertarian" (yes, you read right), has included me among 20 "important American conservatives." I tossed the site's Russian-language write-up into Google Translate to learn this recognition comes due to American Betrayal.

It is wonderful to see how far and wide American Betrayal has already traveled -- as far as Australia, where a positive review is now the top featured article online in the January 2014 issue of Quadrant, edited by Keith Windshuttle, and now even to Russia. I recently learned that a Polish-language translation of American...

This doesn’t happen often, if ever at all. But this Robert Gates story, whipping through Washington like wildfire, feels like smoke in our eyes.

It all started with an article by Bob Woodward in the Washington Post about the former secretary of defense’s new memoir, “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.” Gates, Woodward writes, had concluded “by early 2010 (that) the president ‘doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war (in Afghanistan) to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.’”

The reporting on China’s commemoration of the 120th birthday of Mao Zedong all seemed to come from the same angle. Festivities were “understated” (Associated Press). Events were “scaled back” (Reuters). The following headline, which ran on the Fox News website over the AP story, is typical: “China marks Mao’s 120th birthday with low-key celebrations.” The story opens: “China’s leaders bowed three times before a statue of Mao Zedong on the 120th anniversary of his birth Thursday in carefully controlled celebrations that also sought to uphold the market-style reforms that he would have opposed.”

Forget for now the “market-style reforms.” Only three times? How “muted”! That, by the way, was the word CNN used to describe the occasion.

Another "politically incorrect" book by another enervated member of the Western intelligentsia about that winning strategy for civilizational destruction known as "muticulturalism" -- Trojan horse for Islamization, among other Western nation-killers -- has again prompted a "heated" response in the media. The book is L'Identité Malheureuse, the writer is Alain Finkielkraut, and it is a pair of journalists from the German publication Spiegel who are hot and bothered.

The questions alone suffice to convey the "interview."

SPIEGEL: Mr. Finkielkraut, are you unhappy with today's France?

SPIEGEL: Why is that? Post-national and multicultural sounds rather promising.

SPIEGEL: Aren't you giving in here to the right-wingers' fears of demise? ...

Note: Even with the post-nation upon them, citizens who lament the evident loss are "right-wingers" harboring "fears"...

One of the more difficult tasks for the layman is evaluating the salvos over the worth/worthlessness of one defector or another as they whiz by. Was that heat or light and then it's gone.

Of course, evaluating defectors in and of itself is also one of the more difficult tasks for intelligence experts and professionals. What about when one defector weighs in about another? After an interview with Romanian defector and DIsinformation author Ion Mihail Pacepa sharply dismissing Soviet defector and New Lies for Old author Anatoliy Golitsyn appeared at WND.com this week, I put out some feelers and received the following response from Jeff Nyquist, which I found of great interest. Nyquist is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Inter-American Institute and author of Origins of the Fourth World War....

This is a fascinating piece of 1952 footage featuring former US Ambassador to Poland Arthur Bliss Lane discussing a Big Lie put over by the Soviets in 1943 concerning their 1940 massacre of thousands of Poles in what is known as the Katyn Forest Massacre.

I'm not sure the facts come through clearly in this short exchange, but the basic outline of events is as follows. The Germans uncovered mass graves containing thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest near Smolensk in April 1943. The Soviets blamed the Germans for the massacre. The Germans blamed the Soviets. The Soviets -- our bosom allies led by "Uncle Joe" Stalin and appeased at all costs by FDR and Churchill -- were, in fact, guilty. The US and British governments under FDR and Churchill not only accepted this Soviet Lie, they amplified, supported and perpetuated it, and for most of the next decade -- even in the face of overwhleming evidence to the contrary. I discuss this notorious cover-up and its deep implications at length in American Betrayal,...

The latest National Intelligence Estimate, the Washington Post reports, conveys the glaringly, painfully, tediously obvious: That "gains" in Afghanistan, repetitiously labeled "fragile and reversible" by the vaunted, disgraced, then vaunted again David Petraeus for years, "are likely to have been significantly eroded by 2017, even if Washington leaves behind a few thousand troops and continues bankrolling the impoverished nation, according to officials familiar with the report." (Emphasis added.)

In the interest of tying up some loose ends, here are a few updates before the new year.

Principle, what principle?

Remember how 2013 began with much ado over Al Gore’s unseemly $500 million sale of Current TV network to Al Jazeera, aka “the Muslim Brotherhood channel”? Even anything-for-a-buck Time Warner Cable saw fit to drop the Qatar-owned “news” organization from its package. Well, TWC this month announced that, yes, it will be bringing Al Jazeera America into 55 million American homes after all. “Financial terms weren’t disclosed,” USA Today reported.

The Few. The Proud. The Gender-Normed.

Remember how, with a stroke of their pens, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey decreed that no battlefield mission or military role would be off-limits to women? Call it the Equal Rights Amendment by executive fiat. But hold on about “equal.” As Elaine Donnelly’s Center for Military Readiness has reported, “gender-norming” is the Pentagon’s idea of “equal.”

It’s been weeks now, more than a month in some places, but it is all about to come to an end.

“It” is the soundtrack of the season – Christmas carols. From mall to shining mall, these carols sync American life in a rare shared cultural experience that lasts exactly as long as the holiday shopping season itself. Most of the widely – OK, incessantly – played songs are secular in content: “White Christmas,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” and more. But their glory days run according to the holiday calendar. They vanish from audio range as soon as Christmas Day is over and the sales begin.

Many will say good riddance, having been Frostied, Rudolphed and Silver-Belled to a tinseled pulp by year’s end. But I will confess to regret on seeing many of the great voices of American popular song once again retired to seasonal oblivion. I refer...

Feeling soaked after the gushers of drenching hagiography that crashed over the world on the death of the Nelson Mandela, I have been trying to reconcile what I know with what we are supposed to believe.

For example, I know Mandela was a founder of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the combat wing of the African National Congress, which was closely allied with the South African Communist Party. Starting in 1961, MK carried out hundreds of bombings, including of civilian targets. When Mandela was sentenced to life in prison in 1964, I know his crime was sabotage and related charges – not political opposition to apartheid, as we are supposed to believe, at least if those comparisons to symbols of non-violence, from Martin Luther King to, yes, Jesus Christ, are to stick.

Another founder of MK was Ronnie Kasrils, a Soviet-trained, South African Communist agent and militant, who, decades later, would serve President Mandela and then President Thabo Mbeki (also...

Michael Goodwin of the New York Post, a former colleague on the old Lou Dobbs shows at CNN, has a column out today interpreting Obama's unseemly behavior at Mandela's funeral. He writes:

But the “selfie” episode also symbolizes the greater global calamity of Western decline. With British prime minister David Cameron playing the role of Obama’s giggling wingman, the “look at me” moment confirms we have unserious leaders in a dangerously serious time.

To say the very least.

Goodwin continues, lambasting Obama & Cameron as empty suits.

Obama and Cameron were posing as world leaders. They will never be confused with FDR and Churchill. The fratboys stand in stark contrast to the days when the “special relationship” meant two great leaders uniting two great countries in the fight for freedom.

Here is the AP photo that runs in the Post illustrating Goodwin's point:

I am reposting a couple of columns below from 2009, written at a time before the Obama "surge" in Afghanistan, based on Bush's "surge" in Iraq, was in full swing.

I have long argued that the Bush surge failed (explanation in three parts here). The Obama surge has failed, too, and for the same basic reason that has nothing to do with leaving Iraq "too soon," or, I deeply hope, "leaving Afghanistan" in 2014. It is vital to stress that these failures are not due to the bravery and sacrifice and skill of our military forces. These forces have resolutely fufilled their impossible missions, to say the very least. The failures lie in war-planning and political strategy, ignorance and fecklessness, at the highest levels of the Bush and Obama White Houses, in the Pentagon, and in the Congress that failed to check them.

The Issue: Afghanistan and the transition to fewer U.S. troops post-2014.

The witnesses: James F. Dobbins, State's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan; Donald Sampler, assistant to the administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides civilian foreign aid; and Michael Dumont, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.

The questions: How much is the US budget on Afghanistan, and how many Americans have been killed and wounded in the last 12 months?

None of the witnesses knew the answers.

Rowan Scarborough reports:

According to the Pentagon's fiscal 2013 budget, it is spending about $88 billion this year to wage the war in Afghanistan. The State Department...

"If he wants to make a lot of money advising Huawei, that's his prerogative," Wolf told the AP. "But he shouldn't be on a critical advisory board that provides intelligence advice on foreign investments in our country."

Once again, thank you, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). The story below is a coloring book example of influence -- Chinese Communist influence -- in the US intelligence chain: a paid consultant of a Chinese tech company who is also (until recently) an advisor to US intelligence regarding foreign investment in the US. That this conflict of interest ( a nice phrase for it) did not strike the intelligence establishment as a concern (another nice word) is, of course, the biggest problem of all.

From the AP:

WASHINGTON -- A longtime adviser to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence has resigned after the government learned he has worked since 2010 as a paid consultant for Huawei Technologies Ltd., the Chinese technology company the U.S. has condemned as an espionage...

The following open letter to Pope Francis was written today by Geert Wilders, the leader of the PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid, Party for Freedom) in the Netherlands.

Your Holiness,

In your recent exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (Paragraphs 247-248) you draw the world’s attention to the indebtedness of Christianity to the Jews and their faith. The exhortation also contains a sharp condemnation of the terrible persecutions which the Jews have endured from Christians in the past.

Your words are words which might inspire many.

Unfortunately, they are in sharp contrast to the expressions of hatred which were voiced last October by the spiritual leader of Sunni Islam, Ahmad Al-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of the Al-Azhar Institute in Cairo.

During an interview, aired on Egyptian television on October 25, Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayeb reaffirmed the relevance of Koranic verse 5:82, which states that of all people the Christians are closest to the Muslims, while the Jews...

An extraordinary thing happened in Washington, D.C., this week. Appearing before a House Judiciary subcommittee, several constitutional scholars forthrightly and unmistakably outlined the leading danger to the survival of our constitutional republic: the usurpation of powers by President Barack Hussein Obama.

This wasn’t just me, a non-lawyer, perplexed by how out-of-whack constitutional checks and balances have become and, in particular, how enfeebled the legislative branch is. This wasn’t even Mark Levin, a constitutional lawyer himself, explaining to his radio audience that we are living in “post-constitutional” times.

This was, for starters, Jonathan Turley, a liberal Georgetown law professor, who, noting that he once voted for Obama, nonetheless warned America that the concentration of executive branch powers, having accelerated under George W. Bush, is approaching a crisis under Obama. “The problem with what the president is doing...

A little birdie tells me that the upcoming Christmas Books feature at the American Spectator will include American Betrayal on my friend Jed Babbin's list. Babbin, a noted author and commentator, is also former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, and long familiar to readers of the Spectator, Human Events and National Review.

Jed writes:

Last and certainly not least, American Betrayal by Diana West documents Soviet penetration of the U.S government during World War II and the parallels today to how the “free world” is reacting to Islam. Do not be dissuaded by the controversy that has erupted around the book which, if you insist on complete accuracy, would be characterized...

A fascinating account from October 28, 2013 of a libel trial in Denmark by Dispatch International editor Lars Hedegaard:

Danish Journalist Jørgen Dragsdahl was a KGB agent
With Friday’s acquittal of history professor Bent Jensen for libel, the Danish Superior Court put an end to a seven-year court battle. Jensen was unanimously and comprehensively exonerated and the court determined that he was ”justified” in calling Jørgen Dragsdahl a KGB agent. Dragsdahl (photo above) was also the man behind the Social Democratic Party’s anti-NATO course during the 1980s. It remains to be seen if the party will take this blow to its reputation lying down.

Here we see the curtain drawn back on the identity of an agent of Soviet influence, a "spy" whose mission under consideration is not the theft of secrets but rather influence on policy -- the topic under consideration in American Betrayal.

It took Professor Bent Jensen (75) – an acknowledged expert on Soviet and Cold War history – seven...

What a publishing coup for the editors at Breitbart News when Vladimir Bukovsky chose to offer them the first chapter of his 1993 book, Judgment in Moscow, for publication for the first time in English. Published in other languages including French (Judgment a Moscou,1995), Random House acquired the book in the 1990s, but, as Bukovsky lays out below, the deal became contingent on deep, transformative revisions he simply refused to make.

As Bukovsky explains, Random House honcho Jason Epstein was determined to shape Bukovsky's remarkable manuscript based on a trove of ultra-secret Soviet documents to fit the conventional wisdom ... the consensus ... the court history of the Cold War -- never mind the evidence as laid out in these stunning documents themselves. Something else Epstein was determined to root out of the manuscript: Bukovsky's interpretation of events, which posits that...

Note: It is a great pleasure, as always, to publish an original essay by the accomplished Canadian writer, poet, and critic David Solway.

"Is American Racist?"

Oprah Bravely Names the Hatred Roiling the American Body Politic

by David Solway

The United States, as many informed celebrities, experts and political figures would have us believe, is without doubt an impenitently racist nation. Most recently, for example, the divine Oprah told the BBC that the “disrespect” which many Americans feel for Barack Obama has to do with the fact that he is African American. Of course, Obama is not African American, he is half-white, so he is at least as Caucasian American as anything else that he might conceivably be. But this is a mere triviality—he is, after all, what we have come to call a “racialized person.” The skepticism with which many Americans have come to regard Obama plainly has nothing to do with his incompetence, his frivolity, his bald-face lying, his betrayal of America’s...

When Thanksgiving 2013 is over, will Americans remember it as the holiday when the Obama administration body-snatched their friends and family and turned them into Obamacare robots?

Maybe it happened to your own loved ones. Maybe Cousin Sue brought her favorite cranberry Jell-O mayonnaise salad, but when she opened her mouth, she sounded like Jay Carney on a roll. As for Uncle Al, there’s a reason he kept asking “Have you thought about signing up for health insurance on the new marketplace?” every time it was your turn at Scrabble.

BarackObama.com told them to.

Turning Thanksgiving into Obamacaring was clearly the Big-Brotherly goal of a disturbing project launched by the president’s campaign website, now known as Organization for Change, or OFA. Entitled “Health Care for the Holidays,” this OFA spinoff provides a “sign-up checklist” to take along to grandmother’s house (bring W-2s and paystubs along with those sweet potatoes). It offers “conversation tips” that include such icebreakers as, “When do you plan on signing up?”

After positively reviewing American Betrayal at Breitbart News at the end of September, Vladimir Bukovsky and Pavel Stroilov found themselves subject to a flurry of attacks. They have now responded, not in kind but rather to explain why "a more intelligent debate" over the issues raised in American Betrayal is urgently needed despite what they call "the vehement campaign against the book."

I forgot to post my most recent column on the disastrous US-Afghan agreement. Since writing it, the loya jirga has approved the agreement, Hamid Karzai has nixed it, and now the Obama administration is trying to get some other Afghan government official to sign it. Meanwhile, a new draft Afghan penal code restores death by stoning for adultery. More making the world safe for sharia -- courtesy Uncle Sucker.

My most recent column

Now that U.S. and Afghan negotiators have agreed on terms of a seemingly open-ended – if reduced – U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the Obama administration alike breathlessly await the verdict of the world’s greatest deliberative body.

Today, Andrew Bostom notes for the record: "Nuke Deal Ignores Iran's Genocidal Islamic Jew-Hatred." Quite. He proceeds to fill in these gaping holes in both the deal itself and, almost worse, in its schematic reporting with a historical/religious overview of the past half-millenium of theocratic Shiite rule. This was interupted by 54 years rule of by Pahlavis, father and son, whose Western-oriented and secularizing regime (1925-1979) would be overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini, the inspiration of Iran's current leader, Rohani.

Bostom writes:

The so-called “Khomeini revolution,” which in 1979 deposed the secular, Western-oriented regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, was in reality a mere return...

Gates of Vienna has published an important declaration from Geert Wilders

Let us raise a flag of truth and liberation
by Geert Wilders

Nine years ago this month, in November 2004, policemen wearing bullet proof vests and carrying machine guns picked me up at my home and drove me to a safe place. This happened two days after the filmmaker and Islam-critic Theo van Gogh was murdered by an Islamic assassin in broad daylight on an Amsterdam street. The police brought me to safety because Islamic criminals had threatened to kill me, too. Because I, too, spoke the truth about Islam, the biggest threat to our freedom and our civilization.

Since that ominous date, nine years ago, I have been forced to live under constant police protection. I have lived in army barracks, prisons and safe houses. The threats continue to this day and have deprived me of my privacy and my freedom.